As the saying goes: "It is difficult to bloom flowers that are bright, fragrant and resistant to cold and snow in a greenhouse. Only through hardship can one hope to succeed."
Hua Luogeng, this "The people's mathematician" dedicated his life's energy and sweat to his beloved mathematics.
Hua Luogeng was born on November 12, 1910 in Jintan County, Jiangsu Province. When he was young, he loved to use his brain, and was often nicknamed "dork" by his peers because he was too attentive in thinking about problems. After graduating from junior high school, Hua Luogeng attended Shanghai Zhonghua Vocational School, but dropped out because he could not afford the tuition. After that, he studied tenaciously by himself and completed all the mathematics courses in high school and junior college in 5 years.
When he was 20 years old, Hua Luogeng caused a sensation in the mathematics community with a paper and was invited to work at Tsinghua University.
In 1930, when Xiong Qinglai was the dean of the Department of Mathematics at Tsinghua University, he discovered Hua Luogeng’s name from an academic magazine. After learning about Hua Luogeng’s self-study experience and talent in mathematics, he resolutely broke the rules and allowed students with only junior high school education to Hua Luogeng entered Tsinghua University with a degree.
Since 1931, Hua Luogeng studied while working at Tsinghua University, completing all courses in the Department of Mathematics in one and a half years. He taught himself English, French, and German. After publishing three papers in foreign magazines, he was appointed as a teaching assistant under unusual circumstances.
In 1936, Hua Luogeng went to Cambridge University in England. During his two years in the UK, he overcame many mathematical problems. One of his papers on Gauss brought him world fame. During the Anti-Japanese War, he returned to the disaster-ridden motherland. On a stilt building in Kunming, he wrote "Theory of Numbers for Stacks."
In September 1946, Hua Luogeng was invited by Princeton University to give lectures in the United States. In 1948, he was appointed as a tenured professor by the University of Illinois in the United States.
After the founding of the People's Republic of China, Hua Luogeng gave up his favorable treatment in the United States, overcame many difficulties and returned to the embrace of the motherland, and devoted himself to my country's mathematical scientific research. In March 1950, he arrived in Beijing and subsequently served as director of the Department of Mathematics at Tsinghua University and director of the Institute of Mathematics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
In 1956, he began to prepare for the establishment of the Institute of Computational Mathematics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
In 1958, he served as vice president and chairman of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Science and Technology of China.
In just a few years after returning to China, his research in the field of mathematics was fruitful: his paper "The Theory of Functions of Multivariable Complex Variables in Typical Fields" won the first-class national invention in January 1957. Award, and has published Chinese, Russian and English monographs;
In 1957, he published "Introduction to Number Theory";
In 1963, he and his student Wan Zhexian co-wrote "Typical Number Theory" The book "Group" was published...
After Hua Luogeng lost his left leg due to illness, he had to draw a big circle with his left leg before walking, and then take a small step with his right leg. For this strange and laborious walking, he once humorously called it "the movement of circles and tangents." In the face of adversity, he stubbornly fought against fate. He said, "I want to replace my unhealthy legs with a sound mind." With this spirit, he finally grew from a young man with only a junior high school diploma to a generation of mathematics master. He was a researcher and founder of Chinese analytic number theory, canonical groups, matrix geometry, self-guiding function theory and other fields. His book "Theory of Stacked Prime Numbers" became a classic of mathematical treatises in the 20th century.
Due to the kindness he received from "Bo Le" in his youth, Hua Luogeng paid special attention to the cultivation of talents. The story of his discovery and training of Chen Jingrun is a legend in the mathematics community. Under his personal care and intervention, Chen Jingrun was transferred from Xiamen University to the Institute of Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and eventually achieved world-leading results in overcoming Goldbach's conjecture. In addition, Wan Zheyuan, Lu Qikeng, Wang Yuan, Pan Chengdong, Duan Xuefu and others also grew up under Hua Luogeng's careful cultivation.
While engaging in mathematical theoretical research, Hua Luogeng worked hard to find a way to combine mathematics with industrial and agricultural practice. After a period of practice, he discovered that the coordinating method and the optimization method in mathematics are commonly used methods in industrial and agricultural production, which can improve work efficiency and change the face of work management. Therefore, while giving lectures at the University of Science and Technology, he led students to promote optimization and coordinating methods in industrial and agricultural practice to serve industrial and agricultural production.
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Award-winning honors
"The God of Chinese Mathematics", "The Father of Modern Chinese Mathematics", and "The People's Mathematician".
Hua Luogeng and Qian Sanqiang are considered two meritorious scientists in the Chinese computer industry, and both have made significant contributions. Master of number theory, pioneer of function theory of multiple complex variables and matrix geometry.
Hua Luogeng is an internationally renowned mathematics master. His name is listed with a few classical mathematicians in famous museums such as the Smithsonian Museum and the Chicago Museum of Science and Technology in the United States. He was elected as a foreign academician of the American Academy of Sciences, an academician of the Third World Academy of Sciences, and an academician of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Federal Germany. He was also awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Nancy in France, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Illinois in the United States.
In 1954, 1958, and 1974, he was invited to give reports at the International Mathematics Congress (this is a very high honor), but unfortunately he was not approved.
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Academic influence
Created the Chinese school of mathematics and led it to reach world-class levels. It has trained many outstanding young people, such as Wang Yuan, Chen Jingrun, Wan Zhexian, Lu Qikeng, Gong Sheng, etc., many of whom have become world-class celebrities.
In the 60 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China, he has been "one of the 100 people who moved China."
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Quotes
Although Jincheng is happy, it is better to return to my hometown; although Liangyuan is good, it is not a place to stay for a long time. Come back.
When people help me, I will never forget it. When I help others, I won’t forget it.
In the long march of seeking the truth, only by learning, constantly learning, diligently learning, and creative learning can we cross mountains and ridges.
As time goes by, we accumulate meritorious deeds, and we make every effort to make every effort possible.
Time is accumulated in minutes and seconds. Only those who are good at using sporadic time will achieve greater results.
A strong man fights to the death, regardless of some scars, fighting against a thousand-year-old demon and fighting for the new style of EMI. Be generous with yourself.
In self-study, you are not afraid of a low starting point, but you are afraid of not reaching the end. Scientific achievements are accumulated bit by bit, and only long-term accumulation can turn the bits into a sea.
I think that people have two shoulders, and they should play a role at the same time. I want to use one shoulder to carry the burden of door-to-door delivery, and deliver scientific knowledge and scientific tools to the hands of the master workers; the other shoulder It can be used as a human ladder for young people to climb to a higher level of science. Hua Luogeng's genius cannot be relied upon, his intelligence is unreliable, and it is unimaginable to pick up great scientific inventions by chance.
Learning and research are like climbing a ladder. If you want to climb up step by step, if you try to take four or five steps at a time and reach the sky from the ground, you must be able to fall.
Everyone must develop the habit of self-study. Even students in school today must develop the habit of self-study, because sooner or later they will leave school! Self-study is the ability to learn independently and think independently. Traveling still depends on the traveler himself.
Go step by step! The path I have taken is a step-by-step path.
The ability to think independently is very necessary for engaging in scientific research or any other work. In history, any major scientific invention is due to the inventor giving full play to this original spirit.
Science is an honest knowledge. When conducting scientific research, we must adopt an honest and realistic attitude, without any falsehood or exaggeration. If you don’t know, you don’t know. If you don’t understand, you don’t understand. If you don’t understand, don’t pretend to understand, and you have to pursue it. If you don’t understand, you don’t understand where you are; if you understand, you understand where you are. The first thing to do with an honest attitude is to lay a solid foundation. Science is a solid knowledge with strong coherence and systematization. If you don’t learn the previous things well, you won’t be able to advance to the later ones. If you don’t lay a good foundation, it will be more difficult to be cutting-edge. We often encounter some problems at work that cannot be solved, many of which are due to the lack of a good foundation. The speed of a person's progress in scientific research and other work is often related to his foundation.
It is best for us to regard our own life as the continuation of the life of our predecessors, a part of the same life today, and the beginning of the life of future generations. If this continues, science will become more brilliant day by day, and society will become more beautiful day by day.
If there is any accidental opportunity in scientific discovery, then this kind of "accidental opportunity" can only be given to those who are well-educated, to those who are good at independent thinking, and to those who have the ability to think independently. People with perseverance will not give up to lazy people.
The same is true for "difficulty". Facing the cliffs, you can't see a crack in a hundred years, but with an axe, you can advance inch by inch, you have to advance foot by foot, and keep accumulating. The leap will come, and the breakthrough will follow.
There is no smooth road in science, and there are countless rocks and shoals in the long river of truth. Only herb collectors who are not afraid of climbing, and tide-drifters who are not afraid of huge waves, can climb to the top to collect fairy grass and go deep into the water to find Li pearls.
Intelligence comes from hard work, and genius comes from accumulation.
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Past anecdotes
The glorious name that represents China
Because of this name, our country does not have It has been forgotten in the international theoretical scientific community; because of this name, there is some gratifying hope in the desolate Chinese theoretical scientific community.
Early study period
Born on November 12, 1910, in a small businessman family in Jintan County, Jiangsu Province. His father, Hua Ruidong, opened a small grocery store, and his mother was a A virtuous housewife.
When Hua Luogeng was born, his father was already 40 years old. They had a son at the age of 40. The couple regarded their son as the apple of their eyes. In order to bless their son, they used two baskets to hold him when he was born. Hua Luogeng was named after him.
He entered Jintan County Junior High School at the age of 12. After his first year of junior high school, he fell deeply in love with mathematics. One day, the teacher came up with an arithmetic problem called "I don't know the number of things". The teacher said that this is a famous arithmetic question in "Sun Zi Suan Jing": "Now there is something whose number is unknown. If you count three or three, there are two left. If you count five or five, you will have three left. If you count seven or seven, you will have two left. What is the geometry of the object?" "23!" As soon as the teacher finished speaking, Hua Luogeng blurted out his answer. At that time, Hua Luogeng had not studied "Sun Zi Suan Jing". He thought with the following wonderful method: "The number of threes and threes has two left, the number of sevens and sevens has two left, and the remainders are all two. This number may be 3×7+2 =23, divide it by 5 and the remainder is 3, so 23 is the number you want."
Hua Luogeng does not admit that he is a genius.
After graduating from junior high school in 1925, because his family was too poor to study in high school, he had no choice but to study accounting at the China Vocational School founded by Huang Yanpei in Shanghai, in order to find a career like accounting to support his family. Within a year, he was forced to drop out of school due to the high cost of living and returned to Jintan to help his father run the grocery store. In the monotonous life of standing at the counter, he began to teach himself mathematics. When he returned to his hometown, he helped his father work and keep accounts in "Qianshengtai", a grocery store with a small storefront, and continued to study mathematics. Recalling his hard self-study at that time, his sister Hua Lianqing said: "Even though it was winter, Luo Geng was still reading his math book on the account table. When his nose ran down, he wiped it on his nose with his left hand and flicked it to the side. , didn’t shake it off, just stretched it out like this, and kept writing with his right hand..."
At that time, Luo Geng was standing in front of the counter. When customers came, he would help his father with his business, abacus, and accounting. , as soon as the customer left, he immersed himself in reading and solving math problems. Sometimes he is so obsessed that he forgets to receive customers, and even treats the calculation results as the payment due from the customers, which scares the customers. Because similar inexplicable things often happened, it became a joke among the neighbors over time, and everyone nicknamed him "Luo Duzi".
Whenever a customer was being neglected, my father would get angry and anxious, saying that he was too tired to read the "Heavenly Book" and wanted to forcefully burn the book. When disputes occur, Hua Luogeng always clings to the book.
Later, recalling this period of life, he said: "It was the time when I should have received education, but the word 'poor' deprived me of my dream: I was wiping my nose on the northwest wind. , a pair of straw sandals, a cigarette, a roll of lamp grass and a needle, struggling to survive." He taught himself tenaciously until he was 18 years old. In the autumn of 1927, he married Wu Xiaoyuan. In 1929, Hua Luogeng was employed as a clerk at Jintan Middle School and began to publish papers in Shanghai Science and other magazines. In the winter of 1929, he suffered from severe typhoid fever. After nearly half a year of treatment, he recovered. However, the joints of his left leg were severely damaged and he was left with a lifelong disability. He had to use a cane to walk.
In fact, when Hua Luogeng was in junior high school, he was not good at his homework and sometimes failed the math test.
Hua Luogeng's mathematics teacher who was teaching at Jintan Middle School at that time, Wang Weike (1900~1952, a native of Jintan), a famous educator and translator in my country, discovered that although Hua Luogeng was playful, he was quick-thinking and often changed his mathematics problems again and again, and his problem-solving methods Very unique and unique. Once, when a teacher at Jintan Middle School lamented that the school had many "bad students" and no "talents", Wang Weike said: "Not necessarily, in my opinion, Hua Luogeng is one of them!" "Hua Luogeng?" A teacher said with a smile: "You Look at his two characters that look like crabs. Can he be considered a 'talent'?" Wang Weike said excitedly: "Of course, he has little hope of becoming a great calligrapher, but his talent in mathematics is not something you can count on. How can we tell from his words? We must know that when gold is buried in the sand, it looks no different from the sand. As teachers, we most need to have the ability to dig for gold in the sand, otherwise our talents will be buried. Ah!"
When Hua Luogeng started his career as a mathematician, he only had one copy of "Algebra", one "Geometry" and one "Calculus" with missing pages. Where there is a will, there is a way, and he finally wrote that famous paper at the age of 19.
In the spring of 1930, his paper "The reason why Su Jiaju's algebraic solution to the fifth-order equation cannot be established" was published in the Shanghai "Science" magazine. Professor Xiong Qinglai, who was the director of the Department of Mathematics at Tsinghua University at the time, was very moved by this article after reading it. He asked people around him: "Who is this Hua Luogeng?", but no one had heard of Hua Luogeng. Later, a Tsinghua teacher named Tang Peijing introduced Xiong Qinglai to the life experience of his fellow countryman Hua Luogeng. "This young man is really extraordinary! He should be invited to Tsinghua University." Xiong Qinglai was very appreciative after hearing this. This year, Hua Luogeng was only 19 years old, but he had already gone through a rather bumpy life path.